ABSTRACT
Since the 1850's there has been intermittent but always renewed interest on the part of politicians, academics, and journalists in the particular aspect of interstate rivalry generally termed an "arms race." This chapter presents a systematic investigation of some of the most important aspects of the subject. It looks into the following areas: typology, strategies, outcomes, and hypothetical explanations of the dynamic elements driving the phenomenon. The possibility of a bilateral "connected" or open system arms race refers to a situation in which there are only two adversaries, building in the relevant categories of weapons only against each other, whose bilateral competition may be stimulated by a series of trigger-events originating quite beyond the system of their arms competition. The chapter draws attention to the distinctions among different degrees of third-party involvement in arms rivalry. It is possible to imagine a number of superficially similar, yet distinct, variants of the two-tiered arms race.
